Architectural Interventions Endow Awkward Spaces with Scale and Light

When Lee F. Mindel paid his first visit to the house near Palm Beach, Florida, he was not exactly charmed. “It looked like a marzipan ranch house with a Spanish flair and had as much architectural discipline as a banana,” he remembers. “Out back was a swimming pool covered by a screen structure resembling a giant hairnet.

“You haven’t bought this yet, have you?” he recalls asking his clients hopefully. They responded reluctantly that they had.

For the past several years the couple, who divide their time between Princeton, New Jersey, and Florida, had maintained a modest house in a gated community near Palm Beach. When a five-bedroom house in the same community came on the market, the couple grabbed it. Large enough to accommodate their visiting children and grandchildren, it was also big enough for entertaining.

“We had visions of open, light-filled interiors,” the wife says. “But we knew that the house needed a makeover to get us there.”

Reconstructive surgery was more like it, according to Mindel, a partner in the New York architectural firm Shelton, Mindel & Associates. “The house had been filled with lifestyle amenities and a checklist of things that supposedly make life comfortable yet lose sight of what makes life exciting,” he says.

The couple, who had collaborated with Shelton and Mindel on three previous residences, gave them one important restriction: The budget was limited. The architects would have to address structural problems without necessarily being able to eliminate them. This condition inspired a lean and disciplined architectural solution offset by casual, playfully humorous spaces that were assembled with the help of project interior designer Grace Sierra.

Located on a quiet, sun-drenched site, the 4,500-square-foot house had uneven ceiling heights—reflecting the erratic roofline—that thwarted its potentially dramatic interior. Irregular doors and windows failed to take full advantage of the views of the golf course and made the spaces feel jarring. At the same time, the public area, with its towering ceilings and polished travertine marble floors, seemed too vast and opulent.

The architects’ goal was to reinvent the house, introducing an intimate sense of scale while incorporating golf course views.

They did so in three simple moves: To unify the living area, they installed a sixty-five-foot continuous floating ceiling. Thirteen feet high, the new ceiling hangs several feet below the original and masks the lighting system while establishing a “human” scale.

To articulate an ordered sequence of rooms, they designed partitions that orchestrate the flow of the spaces. The pavilion-like public area is the centerpiece. It contains the living and dining areas and has private quarters at either end. A stationary partition sets it off from the kitchen and breakfast area to the east. Creating an elegant asymmetry, a pivoting wall opens into the study, which is a transitional room to the master suite to the west.

To strengthen the house’s rapport with the exterior, they replaced the doors and windows on the southern exposure with a twelve-foot-high curtain wall that introduces yet another ordering scale into the rooms.

With a strict architectural framework in place, Shelton and Mindel embraced a relaxed look for the interiors that celebrates popular culture. To a large extent, the clients’ personalities inspired this approach. “They’re open,” Mindel says. “They love life. They love to explore. They like modernism. They’re energizing. That set the tone for so much.”

The architects also took their cues from nature. “There was no way to ignore the potency of the sunlight or to compete with the green expanse of the golf course,” Mindel explains. “We had to find a way to integrate them into the overall concept of the design.”

To this end, Shelton and Mindel hung floor-to-ceiling linen draperies throughout, using them, in particular, to conceal the uneven windows and glass doors on the northern façade. They laid simple vinyl mats to help offset the shine of the travertine marble floors. And they selected a variety of fabrics—terry cloth, Ultrasuede, canvas, muslin, linen, leather—in shades of white and ivory.

“We had to create a unified palette,” Mindel says. “We didn’t want any element to pop. We looked to materials rather than color to provide interest. The light does incredible things as it hits the different textures.”

That was the original idea, at least. In his quest for pop culture icons for the house, Mindel came across an old McDonald’s “golden arches” sign. “When it was hung,” the wife says, “it felt like sunshine coming in. So we decided to use yellow accents throughout the house to warm up the interiors.”

“The tight budget was kind of rewarding,” Mindel says. “We were forced to think economically on more levels than one. There’s no preciousness to the design.” The architects are pleased, as well, with the easy interplay of seemingly incongruous objects throughout. “If the Farnsworth House were crossed with a ranchburger,” Mindel adds, “this would be the love child.”